Graduate Course Offerings

This graduate course will provide you with the opportunity to explore the work of several major (and emergent) Jewish-American fiction writers who have worked to carve out a niche in the broader literary marketplace. These writers have occupied positions both at the margins and at the very center of our literary conversation. Following the path of Jewish-American fiction through four general phases--immigrant assimilation, alienation, rediscovery, and the new immigrants--this graduate-level survey is designed to introduce you to the Jewish-American literary tradition and to the aesthetic and cultural issues informing this tradition, with a keen eye toward its synergies and rivalries with other literary traditions (e.g., modernism, "American" literature, postmodernism). Writers will include Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Dara Horn, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nathan Englander, Molly Antopol, and Gary Shteyngart.

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and Graham Greene, a master of the psychological thriller, were born within a few years and a few miles of each other. This course will explore the fascinating parallel careers of two leading British post-war novelists, examining how their different influences led to important developments in the thriller form. Where Greene’s breakthrough thrillers like Brighton Rock and Orient Express brought him fame in the 1930s, Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel Casino Royale was published when Fleming was in his 40s, and living part of the year in Jamaica. While Greene derived inspiration from the realism of Joseph Conrad, Fleming was influenced by the romantic spy fiction of John Buchan. Both writers traveled extensively around the world, worked as journalists, and served in British Intelligence during World War 2. These influences and others will be explored in the novels to be studied in the course, including Brighton Rock and The Human Factor (Greene), Casino Royale and From Russia with Love (Fleming). We will also be covering the biographical backgrounds and delving into the influential films based on their novels (including Terence Young’s From Russia With Love and Otto Preminger’s The Human Factor). Requirements include a research paper, bibliography, and oral presentation. For more information about this course, please contact Professor Buckton directly (obuckton@fau.edu).